Yes, yes - we know playing video games is the key indicator, but does collecting and fetishising real guns amount to nothing at all?

In America, you gun-strokers have all become tremendous fans of identifying the mentally ill (yet somehow don't want laws change that would stop people from buying at gun shows where no background check happens anyway) - doncha think that maybe an obsessive attraction to guns might not just be a sign of mental illness in and of itself?

And to Adam Lanza's mother (if you could reply): do you think fomenting a home environment where guns were literally in the bedroom of a son who was obviously vastly emotionally challenged was a good idea? And awwwwww - how cute - you have him birthday money especially to go buy another gun. Your aiding and abetting his fascination turned out well for everyone, didn't it?

So - gun-strokers: is there ever any amount that adds up to too much gun? Or is every wide-eyed fruitcake who wants to amass a suburban arsenal A-OK in your book - until they start playing video games?

So some well-intention-ed women swaddles her unstable son in guns and thousands of rounds of ammo. 26 innocent Americans and their families pay the ultimate price. And this is not an isolated incident. And the gun-nuts mutter ho-hum, yawn, oh well, that's the price we must pay for our ridiculous paranoia. And the rest of the civilized world shakes their heads in bewilderment.

I honestly think that two core threads run through the gun-nut mentality;

(1) Selfishness; I must maintain superior armaments to any potential adversary, no matter how ridiculousness or what the cost that such proliferation of weaponry costs my fellow countrymen, and

(2) bad things only happen to others; gun tragedies only happen to other people, people who are clearly morally and intellectually inferior.

I thought that the Newton tragedy was going to be the last straw. Now I see that that the fear mongers are prevailing and our spineless politicians are kowtowing to the NRA and gun manufacturing lobby. It will take another massive tragedy (or three or four) before Americans wake up to the costs of living in a gun-saturated nation.

Those with an obsessive attraction to and fetish about guns are sometimes in your face about it. They love to talk about their arsenals, calibers, cost, etc. Right or wrong, they remind me of people I see with pit bulls. These people seem to enjoy others' dubious looks, knowing their breed's well-documented record of brutal attacks. Maybe I'm all screwed up, but too many gun-toters and pit owners I've seen have a Make My Day aura about them. I look at an open-carrier the same way I do a person with a pit. And in each case, the question of motive makes me do a slight burn.

It's hard to take this post seriously when you keep using the phrase "gun-stroker".

I didn't use the term by accident. As I've spoken about before, guns and the sex drive are inextricably linked. You don't have to be too imaginative to see that a long, hard object that ejects things with explosive force has some echoes of a certain biological process.

For many gun-strokers, guns gives them a feeling of potency that they don't have in their life. Others are highly potent and the object is a further talisman of their power.

Both of these groups often justify their primal desire for a powerful object with all the ridiculous crap that surrounds the 2nd Amendment -- that they're uber-patriots, that they're protecting themselves from the possibility of an out-of-control gummint, that they're keepin' their wimmins and chil'ren safe. However -- that's mainly fluff. The geniuses who sell them their phallic symbols know what really makes them tick, and it's what I've outlined above. But having their enormously powerful lobby group wrap it up in patriotism makes the attraction all the more seductive.

Yeah, yeah -- I know. The 2nd Amendment is what has Kept America Free. It's not AT ALL an anachronism from a vastly different contextual backdrop -- it's the bedrock of your society! It's just like everyone knows -- if the incredible, still-as-relevant-as-ever 3RD Amendment wasn't in place, then right now some gummint shock-trooper would be quartered in your living room! Times NEVER, EVAR change!

I thought that the Newton tragedy was going to be the last straw. Now I see that that the fear mongers are prevailing and our spineless politicians are kowtowing to the NRA and gun manufacturing lobby. It will take another massive tragedy (or three or four) before Americans wake up to the costs of living in a gun-saturated nation.

If the Newtown massacre and the deaths of innocents every single day doesn't give us results, I'm not sure anything will. Maybe if the media continues to highlight the efforts to stop gun violence - there are many, many groups now including Moms Demand Action and the $$$ inserted by Bloomberg/Mayors Against Gun violence http://www.demandaction.org/ who do seem to be in it for the long haul. I thought something would happen after Va Tech or Aurora. Did you know that Va Tech is the deadliest shooting incident by a single gunman in U.S. history? The 6th anniversary is in just about 2 weeks.

As I've spoken about before, guns and the sex drive are inextricably linked. You don't have to be too imaginative to see that a long, hard object that ejects things with explosive force has some echoes of a certain biological process.

For many gun-strokers, guns gives them a feeling of potency that they don't have in their life. Others are highly potent and the object is a further talisman of their power.

I don't believe this assertion. Do you have any science to back it up?

Those with an obsessive attraction to and fetish about guns are sometimes in your face about it. They love to talk about their arsenals, calibers, cost, etc. Right or wrong, they remind me of people I see with pit bulls. These people seem to enjoy others' dubious looks, knowing their breed's well-documented record of brutal attacks. Maybe I'm all screwed up, but too many gun-toters and pit owners I've seen have a Make My Day aura about them. I look at an open-carrier the same way I do a person with a pit. And in each case, the question of motive makes me do a slight burn.

I had that same revelation while discussing Astronaut Kelly's daughter's pitbull attack on a seal pup at Laguna Beach last weekend.

The thread got lengthy and concluded with meme's about people 'fantasizing beating up dogs" and posters saying they'd adopt pits becasue they are a maligned breed.

Some people get pitbulls for the 'bad ass' factor. Some get them not knowing what they are getting, and the sympathy factor causes other people to accept the rejected and abused dogs.

In any event, they all end up with a breed that regularly causes massive damage... like a gun in the wrong hands... and the sympathizers of the breed isssue the standard rationalizations for the attack.

"Blame the owner, not the gun.Blame the owner, not the breed"

When the unsuspecting innocent victim is some little kid down the street, a kid is dead. Gun, pitbulll, same same; dead kid.

Well said. Where the blame lies is far less important than protecting the innocent victims.

It's interesting to note that many insurance companys won't cover home owners or businesses for damage done by breeds that make actuaries cringe.

How the ins co's accomplish this varies from state to state, but I've received the list of uncovered breeds from both my home and business insurance companies. Breeds make the list based on the breeds ability to cause serious damage that will likely results in a trip to an hospital operating room (reconstructive surgery is hugely expensive)or morgue.

Hence, pits, rotts, etc, are on the list. Dachshunds, chihuahuas, etc - both known to be nasty little nippers - not on the list.

Interesting, to that most municipalities have restrictions on dogs that are deemed dangerous. Of course, there's no amendment like the 2nd for pets.

How the ins co's accomplish this varies from state to state, but I've received the list of uncovered breeds from both my home and business insurance companies. Breeds make the list based on the breeds ability to cause serious damage that will likely results in a trip to an hospital operating room (reconstructive surgery is hugely expensive)or morgue.

But insurance companies should cover everyone !

No Pre-existing dog clauses

The blood suckers make huge profits

We should get it for free from the government

How will the poor people keep their Pit Bulls without Obamadog insurance?

Of course you don't. I'm going to say this in the nicest way possible: you don't seem to have much ability to divine the subtextual meaning of things -- you exhibit an extremely literal mindset.

Do you have any science to back it up?

Doing a quick scour, I didn't see much that was directly relevant in the way of papers.

But then again -- nor is there a significant corpus for the other bleedingly obvious topics, for instance: "An investigation into the perceived cuteness of fluffy bunny rabbits".

However -- demographics are very telling. Fully 80% of gun-owners in the US are -- wait for it -- men (as is every mass shooter yet known). The latest study by the U of Chicago shows that while raw numbers of gun owners are dropping, the individual arsenals are getting bigger. So, it's less men actually owning guns, but the ones that do are becoming more ardent in their desire.

And I'll go you one better. Bushmaster -- purveyors of the finest in mass-shooting wares -- knows what makes their idiot customers tick, regardless of whether or not you "believe this assertion". In a widely-known campaign they gave you a "Man Card" when you bought their kid-killer, and backed it up with a website that was entirely based around how much buying their kid-killer made you a man as opposed to a modern-society-diminished eunuch. Oh of cooooouuuurse it was all tongue-in-cheek -- but for it to have any effect it had to have a basis in something with real psychological bite. If you are naive enough to think that a company with 100s of millions of dollars of sales hasn't done market research and focus groups (with plenty of highly-trained psychologists designing them) to hone its marketing campaigns then you are a babe-in-the-woods indeed.

Let's also go to the thinking of mass-killer gun-nuts themselves, shall we? Anders Breivik complained of having been "feminised" by contemporary society. We all know what his response to this was, don't we? Now, I'm not saying that every owner of an AR-15 is a potential Breivik -- but to not see the obvious link between MASSIVE LONG HARD THINGS THAT GO OOOOOH-YEAHHHHH BLAM! BLAM! BLAM! when you pull the trigger and male sexuality is just plain ridiculous.